


Movie Night

by Darkfromday



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 2012 Avengers Tower Fic Vibes, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Domestic Avengers, Gen, Happy Leap Day!, Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22967890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkfromday/pseuds/Darkfromday
Summary: They get together for sappy movies two nights a month, but pretty soon therealsappy movie is what's happening off screen.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Clint Barton & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark & Thor, Clint Barton & Avengers Team
Kudos: 29





	Movie Night

Here's the thing: the movie nights start as a joke.

The shawarma restaurants of New York City roll with post-apocalyptic pop-ins by the Avengers for about six months after Manhattan before they get sick of them. Tony Stark may cut a handsome figure and an even handsomer check for damages, but there's only so much destruction and rebuilding a small business owner can take (and only so many "Superheroes Shawarma Here" shirts they can sell for profit) before they run out of steam. And patience.

So the Avengers have to find another way to bond outside of work.

Compromising on what that _is_ takes some time too. The six of them are drastically different people; the only thing they have in common, Clint delights in telling his therapist, is that they all have "doesn't play well with others" stamped somewhere prominent on their top-secret SHIELD files. What interests some doesn't merit even a flicker in others: Steve, Natasha and Thor suggest bowling, go-kart racing, and other outdoor activities which speak to their need to move and act and affect, while Bruce, Tony and Clint himself lean toward board games and things that allow them to participate or just observe, being _in_ the moment without smothering it.

Clint's side gets their way with little fanfare when Bruce eventually says, "Speaking as someone who can't get overexcited in public... maybe we should keep _exciting public events_ to a minimum." Thor seems a little disappointed, but no one would know it from how quickly he rallies around his mild-mannered friend.

There's no raging demigod or encroaching alien army the night Steve points out that he's still about fifty-five years behind on movies despite his best efforts. While Tony takes the opportunity to rib the Captain over how many film references he's slipped past him that day alone, Natasha pads over to the kitchen phone in Stark's Tower and calls in a favor from a friend. Twenty minutes later, a box with five decades' worth of movies is dropped off at Reception, seventy floors down.

"I haven't ordered any—" Tony starts to say. Clint doesn't hear the rest because he's already leaping into the ventilation system and squeezing, crawling and sliding his way down to the bottom floor to retrieve their "gift". When Natasha Romanov gives you a Look, you learn quickly to interpret what that Look means if you don't want to be knocked upside the head.

" _Ta-daaa_ ," he says when he drops back down in the middle of them with the treasure.

Tony whistles. "Well, I'll be damned."

"Language!"

They watch _The Sound of Music_ first. Bruce picks, and it's a clever choice: Steve immediately connects with the Von Trapp family's struggle against the Nazis, and Thor gets _exposure_ to some of the best songs ever written or performed. (That last is of course Clint's completely professional opinion, and his therapist has no right to laugh at it _or_ at him for having it. _The Sound of Music_ is a very good movie.) Nat and Tony both decry the movie as overly saccharine but are suspiciously attentive each time Maria and the Captain von Trapp are together on screen.

" _Sir,_ " Jarvis the scary invisible AI says after the credits have finished rolling, " _I do believe the run-time of this film is the quietest you've been since I was activated._ "

Tony half-snarls at his techno-butler, but moments later has joined the other five in a quick but heartfelt laugh. It's the first laugh they share as a team, but not the last.

The movie night is a success, and it begets another and another. The Avengers watch _Batman: The Movie_. Then they watch _Dr. Doolittle_. ("Is there no way to communicate with sentient animals here on Earth...?" Thor wonders aloud.) After that it's _The Love Bug_ , and _Hello, Dolly!_ , and then _The Aristocats_. ("We're doing the symbol of America a goddamn _disservice_ if he hasn't seen at least one movie from the Disney overlords that isn't _Snow White_!" Clint snaps decisively, ignoring the way Tony muffles " _kiss-ass_!" with a cough.)

They go up a year every few weeks, trying to give Steve and Thor as much of a crash course as possible in How Culture Works In Our Small Corner of the World. The more time the Avengers' foes stay in prison, in alternate dimensions, or cold in the ground, the more frequent team movie nights become: twice a month becomes once a week. As time goes on, the movies always range from slightly heartwarming to sickly sweet, with very little in between. Anything they like gets added to a shelf Pepper kindly maintains for them—anything they _don't_ like gets shoved into Maria's hands to re-home to someone in SHIELD. They all agree that Nick Fury probably keeps these leftovers at some secret base he has ready for the next apocalypse.

"So when did you all become friends?" Dr. Ramirez finally asks him one session—and it takes Clint off guard.

But only for a moment. Because then he remembers: that first night the banter was thin on the ground, and they all sat mostly apart, in stiff seats that only fit one—yet over time the stiff seats disappeared, replaced by soft couches and stretchy chairs, places he and Natasha could sprawl over one another, seats Steve could more comfortably sketch movie characters from for Thor's appraisal, spaces for Bruce and Tony to comfortably bump shoulders. And now they switch up: Clint and Tony sit together to bicker over movie archers, Nat and Thor talk women's empowerment and fight scene choreography, and Bruce and Steve critique Hollywood science. And that's just the Wednesday night pairs.

At first, they were just coworkers scrambling for some way to relate outside of bloody battle. Now they groan when a call to action comes in the middle of _Love Actually_.

"I'm not sure," he tells her then, just in time for their session to end.

He collects his stuff and leaves the pastel-blue office with the question still on his mind, right up until the moment his phone shiver-vibrates in the way he's programmed it to when the Black Widow wants him to do her bidding. _MV at 073_ , the highlighted message says, and when he calls to confirm, she only adds: "Bring chips and salsa."

 _Enough for Steve and Tony to fight over and still leave some for us little people_ , he amends in his head. But at 7:30 on the dot that night Clint's on the seventieth floor with two huge bags of Tostitos and six different salsa flavors, and Steve greets him with "oh, thank _God_ ," which is progress for someone whose soul used to visibly leave his body when women on the street said _Goddamn it_ in his immediate vicinity.

So yeah, Clint isn't sure when "team movie night" became part of his actual life and not weird cartoon filler. He's not a hundred percent sure when he started relying on it to stay sane, or when exactly he abandoned his sparse SHIELD helicarrier bolthole and bedroll to repossess one of the million rooms in Stark Tower. He just knows it's _happened_ , and it's going to _keep_ happening, and he's strangely okay with that. He is a thirty-something year-old man with a lot of weapons to his name but not a lot of family—except these five quirky people who don't mind that he's a bit quirky too.

_When did you all become friends?_

_Fuck if I know,_ he thinks. _But maybe it was sometime between_ 9 to 5 _and_ Pretty Woman _?_

No matter when it happened, how it started, his only priority now is making sure it never stops.

**Author's Note:**

> Once is an accident, twice is a habit. Thrice is tradition, so I guess I just post fics of any quality or length on Leap Day now. ^^
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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